These days, Thanksgiving is all about the food—from the classic turkey to delicious pumpkin pie, Americans look forward to overindulging on favorite foods that we associate with the harvest bounty of 17th-century Massachusetts. But...

On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling on all Americans “in every part of the United States . . . to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

Though the United States was embroiled in a bloody and destructive civil war, President Lincoln reminded the nation that there was still much to be...

Essay

Thanksgiving stands as one of the most American of holidays, an autumnal ritual fixed in the imagination as honoring the piety and perseverance of the nation’s earliest arrivals during colonial days....